I've only ever played Bloodborne before in the Soulsborne series, and after starting this my immediate reaction was just how little the developers have evolved these games, at least from 2009-2015. Obviously that's not this games fault since it was the first of the kind. To be fair though this game does make shields useful which was nice, even though they become a bit useless near the end (at least the shield I was using, I never got a chance to use a huge one because my equipment limit wouldn't allow it).

For the first 2 or 3 hours of this game I was frustrated to no end, the lack of ability to level up before beating the first boss was infuriating when you got stuck on a section because there was no way to actually improve, and with each run your healing items would keep decreasing making it harder and harder. It didn't help that I chose what is apparently the worst starting class without realising. But once I beat the boss and the game opened up, I started enjoying it. There were times I had fun, there were times I enjoyed the challenge, and there were times I was angry. But as I kept playing the flaws started seeping through and it felt like with every new obstacle I came to resent the game more and more.

Anyway Demon's Souls is at its best when you're fighting one on one, and, funnily enough, in the boss fights. The game is at its worst almost every other time. I think it'll just be easier to give a full list of things I didn't like about the game:

-Combat is absolutely not suited for fighting multiple enemies at once. While using your chance to attack one enemy (and it's a pretty rare chance in later enemies), the other 5 enemies around you will be on your ass before your first sword swing animation has hit. Plus there's an amount of time after performing a parry or backstab where your character is finishing their animation but you can still be attacked. So... even when you get rewarded for a perfect parry the game still punishes you. It's also possible to be stunlocked after getting hit once, as then the next enemy will hit you and stun you, and while he recovers from his animation another enemy will do it and so on. I'm sure there are builds that can tackle multiple enemies, but it feels like you'd need advance knowledge of the games mechanics, weapons and spells to plan for that.

-Many of the locations aren't suitable for fighting, particular on stairs and bridges where you have no room to roll. And god help you if you're somewhere with no barriers. I remember trying to get to one specific boss room, but it was up a huge flight of stairs with no barriers, and half way up was a magician that had this AOE blast spell that would just knock you off to your death every time. It killed me more than the boss ever could.

-The game is VERY unintuitive and doesn't explain anything. In many cases this can be as little as missing out on a ton of items and content because the thing you need to do is so obscure you'd never work it out without looking it up (swapping items with the crow, wearing a specific outfit to unlock some stairs). But in some cases the game progress is even blocked behind a specific thing you need to do that is never told to you, such as a boss that will infinitely respawn if you don't kill a specific NPC first. Even the world and character tendency, something the entire game is built around and has an entire tab for in the menu, goes unexplained in-game.

-The above also applies to the level design, it's not unusual for the game to introduce new enemy types, or stage hazards in a non-safe environment, leaving you no time to work out what they can do and how to counter it.

-Just like Bloodborne (and I assume Dark Souls), other players can come into your world and just kill you. It once happened to me right after beating a boss and before I could go to the nexus, so basically I lost some world tendency without being able to do anything about it. A mechanic that lets uninvited players come and grief you just sucks ass.

-Just like Bloodborne the visuals are dull. It's just dark grey colours everywhere. They do have some pretty cool location concepts, such as mines and a prison, but it all just looks so bland in practice. Level layouts themselves were a mixed bag. Sometimes they were pretty good and offered shortcuts to reward the player for getting through them, or otherwise were a straight line to the boss but offered side-routes for exploration. Other times they were just a labyrinth where everything looked the same and if you died there was no fast way to get back to where you were (such as the tunnels or Valley of Defilement). You just generally spend waaaaaay too much time retreading the same parts over and over.

-There's this very annoying thing where I'd try to hit an enemy with the usual attack button but he'd just nudge the enemy instead. I never managed to figure out what caused this, even after looking it up, and everytime it happened it just screwed me over.

-The non-linearity of levels creates an incredibly unbalanced difficulty curve. I did 1-1, 1-2, then 2-1, 2-2 and 2-3, then went back to 1-3. After beating 1-3, the first stage of each remaining world was incredibly easy to the point where I'd often just make it to the boss and beat it in a single try. But then the second stage of each world would be a mix of enemies I could easily tank and big enemies that could kill me in 2 shots (and then the boss in x-2 would always be super easy and would do less damage than the big mooks for some reason?). When you let the player do stages in any order you really aren't able to balance the game with their progression.

-The swamp stage exists. I think that's my least favourite stage from any video game ever.

-And then there's the last thing that pissed me off. I was debating whether to give the game a 2 or a 2.5 for a while, but then I fought the 1-4 boss and I saw the message "Soul level drained". There's a boss that can literally undo your progress - multiple hours of your life - and you don't even get the levels back if you die, meaning that the boss you just lost to will now be even harder because you've just lost some levels.

-Equipment weight limit means you realistically only have 50% of what it says you have if you want to have any kind of chance. Also the world tendency thing, if you wanna do it right, means playing the game with 50% health the whole way through.

Basically I just don't like this game because it's boring to look at and its difficulty comes from ignoring game design 101; creating battles that are massively against the players odds by making the enemies attack much faster and stronger than you ever could. Throwing a thousand newb death traps everywhere so that players will often have to spend their time trekking back to their old spot, with the huge risk of losing their souls if they die on the way. Putting battles on stages that go against your defense mechanics, like making rolling impossible, making enemies that can't be blocked by a shield (and getting hit will stun you and turn your stamina to 0).

Weirdly even though Bloodborne is the technically harder game (I can at least say I never needed a co-op partner to beat any of this games bosses), this one felt way more frustrating with its unfairness.

There are definitely times when the game hits the sweet spot of being hard without just punching the player in the face and pissing on their corpse, but damn are they overshadowed.